Beagle

Lately I’ve been spending time getting rid of things that I don’t use or need.  Books, toys, electronics, tools, clothing, pictures, gadgets, trinkets. My theory is that the things that you own that you’re not using or don’t need aren’t just a waste ... [More] of money and space: they’re draining you of your energy.  Every time you walk past that cookbook that you never opened, or that model airplane kit that you meant to assemble, or the oscilloscope that you haven’t turned on in a year, a little neural pattern fires that says “Someday I should..” or “I always meant to…” or “God, I really ought to take care of that.” Each of these tiny feelings of obligation or regret is almost imperceptible on its own, but their accumulation throughout the day is a burden that you may not even know you’re bearing until it’s gone. I’m a pack-rat by nature.  I love to own things that I think are cool or interesting.  So I’m naturally collecting all kinds of junk that is neat at first but that I don’t truly need.  And it’s hard to get rid of these things.  The crappy video eyeglasses that plug into an iPod, the mountain bike headlamp with an enormous battery that fits into your water-bottle holder, a couple of old monitors, a broken GPS, a pile of bad books. There’s a saying among writers about the process of copy-editing: murder your darlings.  You may have crafted a beautiful phrase or metaphor in this paragraph, but if it’s not serving the whole piece, it’s got to come out.  You have to murder your darlings. So as Stephanie and I go around the house spring-cleaning, we’ll hold up this or that item, and ask “murder?”  Sometimes you need to use a vicious word to make a hard decision. It’s hard to do, but the result is a house that gives you room for the things that really matter. [Less]

Avro is my current project. It’s a slightly different take on data serialization. Most data serialization systems, like Thrift and Protocol Buffers, rely on code generation, which can be awkward with dynamic languages and datasets. For example ... [More] , many folks write MapReduce programs in languages like Pig and Python, and generate datasets whose schema is [...] [Less]

For users: Top 10 features you'll love about Android 1.5For developers: Download SDK 1.5

Lately I’ve been using Twitter and Google Docs to find out how I compare to my presumptive peer group with little spot polls.  A few weeks ago I found out that I do, indeed, wake up later than most of you.  On Tuesday I asked the Twitterati if they ... [More] believe in God.  Here are the results, based on 172 replies: Surprised?  I was.  I doubt that this poll would have had the same results three years ago, before the atheist “coming out” movement had so much momentum.  Three years ago, I think there would have been a lot more agnostics. I was also surprised that there were so few animists.   How many people say they are “spiritual, but not really religious?”  I think a lot of that is acting out a primitive animism.  A genetic ur-religion, rooted in our  instinct for anthropomorphization.  Scientists who refer to subatomic particles as “guys,” programmers who say their code is “unhappy,” the urge to describe a car’s “personality.” Crickets mourn - sing out of genetic code. Here’s a random selection of the comments people left on the poll: I wish there were a god, but there probably isn’t and we can’t know and oh my god this dog is so beautiful with such a shiny coat and such well-formed hears and attractive feathering on its rump, clearly there is a god A monotheistic form of Hinduism! [ I didn't even know this existed! --Nat] Active Atheist.  Working to start my own church celebrating science and discovery. Anyone who thinks they can argue rationally for the existence of god(s) needs to read Kant. Anyone who thinks belief has any place near things we can know needs to read Saint(sic!) Augustine’s “de utiltate credendi”. In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god (Jesus) further.  — Dawkins I believe in one God but don’t judge those that don’t I was raised a Catholic and still consider myself a Christian. I do, however, respect everyone’s choice (or non-choice) of religion, don’t try to push my beliefs on anyone. I was raised Jewish but became estranged when I realized that Judaism and Zionism are inextricable. Today I consider myself a sort of vaguely proto-American Buddhist, except without the theological aspects. I’m a born again Christian although I’ve also studied Messianic Judaism. Both believe that Jesus (Yeshua) is the son of God. I’m a reverend in Church of Sweden (lutheran, but think episcopalian). I’m sick of being tolerant and respectful to believers. Religion has way to much power and influence in our societies. Based on crazy people hearing voices.  Watch George Carlin: Religion is Bullshit I’m too lazy to pick a side.  You can’t prove that there are or are not gods, so refusing to answer seems the more prudent solution.  Does it really matter, regardless?  Even if there is a God, we still need to solve our own problems.  We’re not children. No god, but I do enjoy many aspects of religious culture - which is to say community culture based on groupings by religion. You can call God in different ways but he’s always the same if a burning bush told you to kill your son today, people would rightly think you were high… Thanks for playing! [Less]

Thought I’d outline a bit of what I did to get all my posts and tags migrated from LiveJournal to WordPress 2.7.1. Note that this information will be redundant soon enough — there’s much better LJ import support in the latest WordPress trunk. It’ll ... [More] even pull in your ‘Current Music’ and ‘Current Mood’ fields, which I couldn’t do. :-( Some background first. LiveJournal lets you export your blog posts one month at a time. You can feed these files to the WordPress LiveJournal importer. I’ve been blogging there since December 2003, so that was definitely not an option. Some digging around eventually brought me to ljdump. This is a really nifty tool, even if you just want to back up all your posts. It dumps your data into a large set of XML files, which you can collate with the convertdump.py script for uploading to the WordPress LiveJournal importer. There was one hiccup here — a lot of the XML files corresponding to my earlier posts (at least) had an extraneous ASCII character 4 at the end of some lines. I had to use a simple for i in <lj-user>/*xml; do sed -i -e s:$'\004':: before using convertdump.py, and things were back on track (sed ftw!). I used the script to make one big XML file with all my posts, and fed it to the LJ importer, and all my posts were in. But my tags, unfortunately, were not. ljdump happily pulls the tags from LiveJournal, but the importer just ignores them. I found a sort-of patch to fix this, but it seems to be quite antiquated. Based on this and the WordPress importer (that’s the importer that allows WordPress to import from another WordPress blog’s exported output), I wrote my own patch to import LJ tags (against WordPress 2.7.1). Just cd into your blog directory and do a patch -p0 < wp-livejournal-import-tags.patch to use it. That’s it — I dropped all the old posts (requires a plugin to do it all at one shot), and then imported the big XML file again, and voila! Trivial as it was, it was great to see how easy hacking the WordPress code was. There’s more to come in days ahead. I hope it remains this easy. :D Update: Just noticed that the imported comments are not threaded. This kind of blows, because there have been some really long threads on some posts. I guess I’ll wait till the new WordPress goes stable and do a re-import. (file under #suckage) [Less]

So my Google Summer of Code: 2009 project proposal was accepted! I will be working on a 2 phase project revolving around Django’s testing framework, and regression suite. Most notebly, I plan to: Implement Windmill test coverage for Django’s ... [More] Infamous contrib.admin Provide several missing features/conveniences to the Django testing tools While it may not be the most glamorous project, I’m excited for it! When paired with my epic mentors, (the ever-infamous Eric Holscher and notorious George Song) it looks to be a solid summer. You can expect me to post weekly status updates here, as well as anything else relevant to the project. As my ‘get to know Django and make sure I can conform with coding standards etc.’ ticket, I’m planning to add an assertion which checks for dead links after template rendering. Or, as its better known, Django Ticket #5418. I want to also give a quick thanks to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Eric Holscher, Jannis Leidel and all the other PyCon 2009 Sprinters who helped me create the proposal. [Less]

My friend Alex just spent 2 months in India and Nepal, where he hiked the 300km Annapurna Circuit.  During a fifteen-hour layover in Munich yesterday, we had some beers and schnitzel together at a Biergarten, and Alex asked me, “Nat, you and I and ... [More] all our friends are pretty smart, capable people.  Why aren’t we working on something great that could save the world or be worthy of a Nobel prize?” I love my work in the Linux world, and hope it has had some positive impact on the world.  But what Alex said hit home.  Right now, could I be doing something bigger?  Something better?  Could you?  Even if you are passionate about your work, it’s a good call-out and an important thing to reflect about.   If you’re not trying to do your very best, why not?  Do you have a good reason? Alex is pounding this drum on twitter. This theme of Alex’s reminded me of Tim O’Reilly’s “work on stuff that matters” post from January.  Tim had some nice guidelines for “stuff that matters,” but I liked the gut-instinct feeling of Alex’s question.  What’s your Nobel-prize project? [Less]

Last month while he was visiting, my friend Rony and I built a picture frame that can display three images on a single piece of paper.  Two of the images are mapped to the red and blue channels and linearly combined, and the third image (the word ... [More] MARCH in the video above) is projected onto the paper from behind using a stencil. Creating the stencil. A microcontroller controls a set of red, blue, and white LEDs that light the picture, selecting each image in sequence by turning on one set of LEDs at a time.  Rony built the frame itself out of the black foam-core that architects use to make models, and it is really gorgeous. The entire package slides out neatly. One of the challenges was calibrating the red and blue levels in the printed image such that under blue light the blue-printed image disappears completely, and the red image shows with good contrast, and vice versa under red light.  This required a lot of different test printouts, which after the project was over I taped above my desk at home. I think they look pretty cool on their own. Calibration images The images were generated with a tiny opencv-based program that you can find here.  If you want to use it yourself, you’ll probably have to recalibrate the WHITE_POINT macros for your printer/paper.  We printed the final image on acid-free paper so the colors don’t change over time. By the way, opencv is a great library for doing real-time computer vision.  We used it for a very trivial operation, but the samples that ship with the library do things like real-time face detection, and there’s even an eye tracker that uses commercial USB webcams that some people are working on. The light from the white LEDs is diffused a bit before it passes through the stencil. This was my first project using an Arduino and I was completely blown away by the platform.  The Arduino is an Italian-made open-source electronics prototyping platform.  Ours was a very simple Arduino project, just fading in and out some LEDs (you can get the code here), but the platform can do a lot more.  We used a Duemilanove (”2009″) board (pictured below) which has many digital input/output and analog input pins. The board comes with a very simple IDE based on Java, Processing, and avr-gcc.  You code for the device in C and a single click reprograms the onboard Atmel microcontroller over a USB cable.   The documentation is excellent and the platform is extremely easy to code for; it only took us about 15 minutes to get the basic functionality working for this project.  There’s a great serial interface you can use for printf-style debugging; just use Serial.println to send some output to your PC while your code is running.  And Arduinos are extensible via a series of pluggable shields that can provide additional functionality like GPS, WiFi, and touch-screen support. It really is the perfect starter platform for hardware hacking, and if you have any interest in this sort of thing at all, I strongly urge you to go buy the Arduino starter pack from adafruit industries right now. Overall, this was an awesome way to spend a couple of days, and it was also great to work on a project with Rony, who deserves full credit for this idea (which he had while we were jogging around the Nymphenburger Palace) and for the majority of the work.  You can see more photos of the project on Rony’s flickr photostream or mine. [Less]

After waking up at 1pm this “morning,” I posted a survey to figure out when my fellow Twitterers go to sleep and wake up. I used a Google Spreadsheet for the poll, which generates a nifty little summary.  Here’s a screenshot of the scientific ... [More] results: Sleep Poll Results The average sleep time of my twitter-peers seems to be around 7 hours and 15 minutes per night, which sounds about right. Thanks to everyone who responded!  You guys are a lot more normal than I expected. [Less]

I have been silent, I know. Both work and life keep me busy. At work, we released Android 1.1, which added voice search, Latitude, and paid apps. We continue to advance the platform, with exciting upcoming releases including the anticipated cupcake ... [More] milestone. And of course there will be more phones.In life, I spend most of my blogging cycles on my food blog (feed), knocking out several posts a week—that is not just a lot of blogging, but quite a bit of braising, infusing, roasting, and even foam making.I find myself again with pen to paper—nothing anytime soon—and am happy to announce two new translations of Linux Kernel Development: Korean and Simplified Chinese. These new, updated, translations reflect the latest printing of the second edition. Find them at your local bookseller.Also, I got engaged.Outside Bankie Banx's Dune Preserve, Rendevzous Bay, Anguilla, Inauguration DayBut the largest reason for the radio silence is that a lot of my blogging is on economics and I do not have any insight into our current situation. It is disingenuous to blog otherwise. I don't have a great hold on what is going on, and neither do most commentators, including many economists. If the top macroeconomists are without agreement, I am not sure what a trade economist can add, let alone I.That said, I did say this, seven months before AIG's liquidity crisis:The problem: As CDS contracts are not collateralized or otherwise guaranteed, their real value depends on the creditworthiness of the involved parties. The CDS contracts are being marked to market as sizable profit, but if a series of defaults hit, can the reinsuring parties pay the hedgers?Six months ago, I wrote that while the societal and economic situation is not as bad as during The Great Depression, the financial situation is worse. I believe that continues to be true. But therein lies our problem: This is largely a financial, not an economic, mess, thus our tonic is financial, not economic. Few outside of Wall Street fully understand the esotericism that led us here. Yet few inside of Wall Street are trusted by the public. The Obama administration, led by Secretary Geithner, continues to balance that opposition with a "fix" rather than "replace" Wall Street approach. That is my policy prescription, too.Let's hope it works. [Less]